Introduction

Context of Structured Data at Google

Google has made it's reputation organizing unstructured data. Now we're turning our attention to helping people get more out of structured data.

[unemployment rate ireland]

Google Public Data & Explorer is a great example. Data from the World Bank, UN, and other trusted sources is digested to create richer search results. Hans Rosling and his son Ola created the Gapminder visualization, and Ola brought his passion for public statistics to Google to create the next generation of the tool. Now you can upload data to use it too.

Spreadsheets in Google Docs of course is a great cloud-based tool for working with structured data, and even publishing it like the UK Guardian did here for the Drug War Deaths

Google Fusion Tables is an easy way to make charts and maps. A modern data management web app making it easy to host, manage, collaborate on, visualize, and publish data tables online

Example of Fusion Tables

When the UK Guardian DataBlog wrote about the deaths in the Mexican Drug War, they offered a map. The distribution of incidents on the map makes it quite clear that this is effecting the entire country. They used Fusion Tables' map tools to turn a bunch of data into thousands of points on the map.

click link to see map fullscreen

click to see the data in Fusion Tables

click Visualize > Map

Overview of features

[feature list] Now I'm going to demonstrate a lot of great features in Fusion Tables.

all skill levels - this talk is focused on what you can do just in the UI